How to contact suppliers & how to reply to member queries

Hello everyone,

We at SaleHoo want to ensure that everyone's needs are met accordingly - members and suppliers alike. We all know how awful it feels to not be able to contact a supplier or having to wait long for a supplier's reply, so here are a couple of quick how to guides to help out members in contacting suppliers as well as to guide suppliers how to best reply to the messages they receive.

For Members: How to contact suppliers
As you may be familiar we have now incorporated the ability to contact suppliers directly via our directory, with various templates depending on your query. Here's a Link hidden: Login to view for you.

For suppliers: How to reply directly to member/customer queries
Please be advised that as an approved supplier on SaleHoo Wholesale Directory, our members primary means of contacting you will be via our private message system.

You can reply to customers' inquiries by navigating to SaleHoo inbox Link hidden: Login to view

Hope this helps smooth out everyone's line of communication! :)

Hi Richelle,

As a supplier, how do you know a member query is legitimate? Sometimes the messages aren't very clear and I worry it might not be a legitimate query.
Thanks,
Tina

Hi Tina,

I think the best advice I could give is to treat every inquiry as legitimate, no matter what your suspicion may be. Bad news travels a lot faster than good news in the online business world, so you need to be taking every precaution to mitigate as much bad news getting out just to come close to balancing the good news with it.

Things like poor customer response rates seriously irritate retailers and can lead to a lot of complaints in all the wrong places, like trading forums such as SaleHoo.

Will every inquiry be genuine? ... absolutely not. In fact, I would suggest over 50% may well be a complete waste of time, but treating every inquiry as a priority, not matter if it is a waste of time of not is the price of doing GOOD business in this marketplace of online trading.

If you get a message that needs clarifying, simply ask for the clarification that you need to respond in an informative and prompt manner and it's going to be extremely difficult for anyone to be able to have anything negative to say about your level of Customer Service and GREAT Customer Service is a great place to start building a brand's reputation.

As a supplier, always put yourself in the customer's place and serve them as you, yourself, would like to be served and it's hard to go wrong from there :)

Thanks for the advice Mark!

We believe most inquiries are actually serious, but many of them are either new or undecided on which direction to go. So providing some extra help shouldn't hurt.

Thanks

Hi there I am a retailer and within my niche, I contact suppliers regarding possibilities of doing business together and half of these suppliers do not even respond.
If they think the majority of queries are fake then they should not be part of this site.
we pay good money to be able to access suppliers and look to do business with them.
Everyone might not be an ideal fit but at least communication should be a pre-requisite for listing on this site as a supplier. Its beggar's belief that the suppliers think that the cost of doing business is not greater than replying to a query.
I may not renew my membership when it is due.

I am not sure it's necessary to contact suppliers. We have online wholesale shop, just put item to the cart and checkout, that's it! Link hidden: Login to view